Commentary

Content Production, Distribution and Monetization Scale Differently

- Productivity, without adding the commensurate amount of resources (labor), and

- Revenue and profitability.

You Need Money to Buy Time Before You Scale

All businesses strive to be scalable, but many that appear
scalable turn out to be anything but -- and vice versa. Nowadays, thanks to cheap hardware, open source software and social media marketing, technology companies can be launched with a fraction
of the investment once required. Content companies, however, still require material investment to scale. In video, the only things that most content entrepreneurs have to show for, other
than bruised egos, are shattered dreams and wasted millions.

This article certainly isn't about kicking anyone when they're down, but recognizing that production, distribution
and monetization scale differently -- which will help you win over time.

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Investors (Sometimes) Just Don't Understand

Of course, it's not just content
companies that fail to win over investors: Pandora's Tim Westergren went through more than 300 failed VCs pitches before a
successful IPO; before the $1 billion valuation, AirBNB's CEO Brian Chesky didn't get
calls back from 10 of the 20 angels he pitched. My rejection count sits somewhere between
Chesky's and Westergren, and as much as I'm sure it's me/us, sometimes I can't help but ask: "Could it be them, the investors?"

Distribution - like
Technology - Is a Zero-Sum, Scalable Game

To be fair, investors actually do get it by and large. Indeed, they do, when the venerable The Atlantic opines "Why Content Isn't King": "In a media culture committed to the proposition that
'Content is king' ... the dirty little secret is that content aggregators, not content creators, have long been the overwhelming source of value creation."

The Light at
the End of the Tunnel... (Might Not Be an Oncoming Train)

These days, those who control the advertiser relationships understand that with a) distribution
across various screens blurring the lines of advertising and b) a flight to quality content among advertisers, content is more important than ever.

Among those controlling the ad budgets:

1) Broadcasters have all of the content in the world. The problem is, despite what they claim, the economics don't really justify
embracing ubiquitous distribution. What you will see instead is some kind of controlled/limited availability across many platforms, provided it's "black" -- proverbially speaking.

2) Portals have been moving from curating/aggregating to creating for the longest time.

3) Publishers are by definition content creators, so there's nothing new there.

-
Google's YouTube acquired Next New Networks to help it better manage the burgeoning site's content producers.

- After raising a warchest of $40M from 2005-2008, Wetpaint pivoted in 2010 from a UGC wiki-platform to a content creator itself, in an effort
to drop the UGC offerings and produce something marketers actually wanted.

- Most recently, ad network Video Egg merged with blogging platform Six Apart, renamed
itself Say Media and is now focusing on "connecting brands with passionate audiences." Video Egg has raised $34 million while Six Apart raised $23 million, pegging Say Media's
total capital raised at a cool $57 millon.

The point I am making here isn't "See, told you, content is king." Content and distribution are the yin to one another's yang. By now that should be clear.

Rather, it's that
those who built the first layer of the Web were technologists who didn't understand or care about content. They cared about the pipes instead. Now that the pipes are built, it's
all about the content that is running through them. That is the only thing marketers actually care about.

More importantly for the sake of this article: those who built the
companies that convinced investors since 2005 that they could scale are asking their investors to trust them as they all pivot in one way or another straight into content creation. That trend is
blazingly clear today.

As a content entrepreneur who's more passionate about creating the next Rolling Stone magazine instead of the next Intel, or the next MTV cable network
instead of Microsoft, that's not quite as good as "I told you so" - but I guess it will have to do.

I have to say, I truly love reading your articles here in Online Inside Video. An outstanding piece of content I have read in along time, that's not to say the other artilces that I read here before were uninportant.

But this article has got me thinking, for my blogsite.

"Content is King" no matter what your marketing

A very interesting topic, and article worth reading for your online business...

In one sentence you say that "Content isn't King". In the next paragraph you state, "content is more important than ever."

You can't have it both ways. Whether by original writing or content aggregators, "Content is King". The only difference is one is using the others content because they are too lazy to produce it themselves.

I think my conclusion working for 10 years in the content space is this: Content is king, provided you can distribute and monetize it; and distribution is extremely valuable, provided there is content there that is of some quality and you can sell ads against the inventory.